


rocks are a-tumblin' while the people are asleep

by friendly_ficus



Category: Dimension 20 (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Episode 5 Spoilers, Gen, On the Run, nor should they, three people (can’t) keep a secret
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 00:22:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,492
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24105898
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/friendly_ficus/pseuds/friendly_ficus
Summary: Jet’s not a general, Ruby’s not an archmage, Liam’s not a war guy.They have to get through this anyway.
Relationships: Liam Wilhelmina Jawbreaker & Ruby Rocks & Jet Rocks, these kids... family...
Comments: 9
Kudos: 65





	rocks are a-tumblin' while the people are asleep

**Author's Note:**

> this isn't me saying "this will happen" - I am not good at predicting the Actual Narrative. but this is me saying "hey, this could be cool." major spoilers for episode five enclosed within. shameless speculation about candia also within.

With the sound of a teacup shattering, Liam opens his eyes. There’s a strange pressure on his chest and he coughs once, twice, trying to clear it up. He sees—there’s purple energy on his breath, in the air like it’s cold. It tastes sweet, like sugarplums.

He’s laying on a hard floor. Why is he on a floor?

Under his left arm, Preston lets out an animal shriek. The little pig tugs on his wrist, trying to move him.

_ It’s okay,  _ he tries to say, but he doesn’t quite have enough air. He lays there for a little while longer, breathing easing with each second, and there’s a  _ ka-thunk  _ that has raising his head to look down at his chest. Oh, the spear fell out.

Oh,  _ the spear.  _ The spear that the Bulbian soldier had thrown at him, while he’d been wrestling a crossbow from the Imperial Guard at the door. That spear that he’d turned to avoid, misjudging the distance, the speed. That spear.

Huh. Well, if whatever happened after that was dying, it’s pretty overrated.

It takes another moment of Preston snuffling at his side for him to realize the battle is still going. And then it’s all he can think about, all he can do to roll out of the way, scramble to his feet and get between the pews. It’s chaos, truly; he can hear King Amethar shouting but there’s dust everywhere, there’s fog he knows must be from Ruby thick in the air, obscuring everything. He has the crossbow he’d died to get, at least.

He stays low and times his shots as well as he can, the back of a knee here, an armpit there, but he’s running out of bolts. People are screaming, yelling about oathbreaking and war and witchcraft. And Liam’s not—he ducks again as the body of one of the Tart Guard is thrown over the pew—Liam’s not a war guy.

Blood pounding in his ears, he pops back up to search the room. It’s not all indistinguishable shapes; Liam’s got sharp eyes, everyone always says so. Even now, while it seems like the world is falling down, Liam’s got sharp eyes.

(“When you’re in a fight,” Sir Theobald had taught him, right after he’d first been sent to Castle Candy, “if you don’t know what to do, look for me and the king.”

“What if you’re not there?” Liam remembers asking. “What if I can’t find you?”

The knight had smiled, patting him on the shoulder, and said, “Then you find someone to protect.”)

There’s a moment, a gap in the fog where he sees the flash of a caramel wing. 

Ruby twists into an awkward back handspring to avoid a reaching set of hands and Liam starts running across the cathedral floor, putting a bolt through the church official’s throat when she tries again to grab the princess.

“Hey,” he says, moving so they’re back-to-back. Tucked securely into his jacket, Preston snorts.

“You’re alive!” Ruby exclaims, drawing back a shimmering green arrow.

“Where’s Jet? Shouldn’t she be with you?”

“She’s going for Pops—”

Like she’s been summoned, Jet comes hurtling through the fog like a ragdoll and slams into Liam, who staggers but stays upright. There’s a fraction of a second where he’s terrified that she’s dead before she pushes herself off of him and leaps back into a fighting stance.

“Theobald just  _ threw  _ me!” she shouts, turning to look back. But whatever brief tunnel she’d made flying through the fog is gone, full of the sound of weapons crashing against each other.

(War, Liam’s finding, is  _ loud.) _

“Did he tell you anything?” he asks, looking for, looking for something in the chaos around them. He thinks the Pontifex is shouting somewhere.

“Yeah, Pops wants us to go!” 

_ “Go?”  _ he and Ruby exclaim simultaneously.

It’s as angry as he’s ever seen Jet; angrier, even. She shouts a curse and locks swords with the Imperial soldier who’s stumbled towards their position, shoving him back into the fog. There’s a gasp and a gurgle from that direction, along with the  _ thud  _ of a body hitting the floor.

Liam smells sugarplums again and Lapin’s voice is in his ear.

_ Get out of here with the princesses, _ the chancellor sounds strained. _ You need to get out. _

“Where?” Liam asks the air, but no one answers.

“Then we have to go,” he says to the twins, as Ruby fires a gleaming green arrow and Jet falls back into her fighting stance again.

_ “What?”  _ both twins turn on him, Ruby yelling and Jet dangerously quiet.

“No, listen, we have to—”

_ “What are you still doing here?”  _ Calroy roars, slicing a zucchini soldier to ribbons as he fights his way to their little cluster. “Come with me, now! By the order of your father the king!

“Is he even king anymore,” Jet starts, turning to slam the hilt of her sword into another helmeted head, but Calroy isn’t having it.

“Then for his  _ sake,  _ Princess! Or for your sister’s—I swore to die with your father, once, but he has asked me to make sure his children  _ live.” _

And he maneuvers the three of them somehow, himself and Jet cutting a path while Liam and Ruby defend them, until they’re out past the great doors and the guards and the sound of the fighting gets fainter and fainter. Calroy’s face gets grimmer with every step they take.

“Where are we supposed to go?” Jet asks as they duck into an alley, the twins tugging on their peasant clothes.

“Maybe Annabelle would help us?” Ruby offers, but Liam shakes his head.

“We can’t trust her. We can’t trust any of them,” he mutters, head spinning with boons and arrests and King Amethar’s promise,  _ I will die before they kill you. _

“Well put, Master Liam,” Calroy says, still breathing hard. 

And the three of them see it at the same moment: there’s a puddle of syrupy blood on the ground, slowly growing.

“Wherever you go,” the lord adjusts his grip on his sword, “you’ll have to go without me. At this point I’ll only slow you down—”

Jet cuts him off, shaking her head. “We’ve already left Sir Theo and Lapin and, and Pops. We can’t leave you too—” 

“No choice,” he says, tilting his head toward the entrance of the alley. Liam picks it up too, sees when Jet and Ruby hear: the sound of a contingent of Imperial soldiers marching.

“By order of the holy Pontifex,” Constano Grissini’s voice begins, regretful but steady and pitched to carry, “Amethar Rocks has been named an oathbreaker and banished from the Bulb’s light.”

“Go,” Calroy says, herding them further down the alley. “Go, out of the city.”

“His titles are forfeit—”

“I have faith in the three of you. You can protect each other.”

“—his marriage to Caramelinda Merengue found void in the eyes of the church—”

“In the capital they care about the titles, but Candia is  _ yours,  _ Princess Jet.”

“—and his children illegitimate.”

“They won’t fight for me,” Jet whispers, eyes wide. “If I’m not a Rocks, they won’t fight for me.”

Liam clenches his hands into fists, for once not saying the first thing on his mind. They can all hear the soldiers getting closer to the alley entrance, even as they move in the opposite direction.

Calroy looks back, something like regret on his face, before turning back to the three of them.

“They’ll fight for you both because they know you,” he says quickly. “Or they’ll fight in Master Liam’s name, if they care about the titles. Get there, get  _ home,  _ and reassess.”

“What will you do?” Ruby asks, Yak perched on her shoulder.

“Cause trouble, like we did in the war.” And Calroy Cruller takes a deep breath and smiles for them, the way he smiles when the king is telling war stories—like the fight is already over, like they’ve already won. Then he turns, still bleeding, and starts swaggering in the direction of the soldiers, whistling a song from the Candian court.

They’re two blocks away by the time they hear him start to shout about a conspiracy, voice loud in the early morning.

“C’mon,” Jet mutters, angry, and Liam thinks of how they came to Comida. The procession of it all, the performance; it had been exciting. Now he just feels sick.

They’re out of the city an hour before sundown, and Liam stops to tie peppermint flowers to a tree at the side of the Glucian Road. Preston snuffles against his hands once, a comforting snort, and trundles off the road, leading them eastward into the dense fields. They’re not far from a treeline.

\---

“Citrina,” Amethar groans, barely conscious in the cell in the Great Cathedral. “They have your book, ‘Rina. Shouldn’t... we shouldn’t’ve given it to them. Should’ve kept it at home”

The guards posted at regular intervals don’t twitch, don’t even notice a wisp of glowing yellow light float past them to the cell. Amethar blinks, not halfway to incoherent, as the glow outlines a figure that could almost be his sister.

_ I love you,  _ he thinks he hears someone say.  _ Brother, I love you, you are not alone. _

He feels what could be a hand or could just be a warm breeze touching his face, turning it gently so he’s looking out through the bars. 

In the cell across the hall, Sir Theobald Gumbar takes labored breaths. Beyond his own blood pounding in his ears, Amethar can hear each exhale. 

Then the hand moves to press against his forehead, like she’s taking his temperature, and he gives up on staying awake.

(Under careful watch in quarters upstairs, Primogen Lapin Cadbury finishes writing a letter and kneels at an altar to the Bulb. And he prays.)

\---

Ruby takes the third watch, for all that the three of them are sleeping tonight. They’re at the base of the biggest tree Liam could find, so tall they can hardly see the top, dug into the natural cavities between large roots. There’d been talk of going through the night, but they were all wilting from the exhaustion of the day, with leaving the city and, and everything else. 

So when Liam shakes her gently awake, quietly reminding her what any predators might sound like, Ruby’s too tired to complain about it. It was her idea to do watches, anyway.

She sits with her back against the wide trunk, Sour Scratch in her lap and Jet and Liam within eyeshot. Yak preens a little on her shoulder before taking off, silent, and alighting in the branches high above. 

The forest is silent all around them and she’d be afraid to get lost if Liam weren’t here, and she’d be afraid of everything else if the world hadn’t already fallen apart once today. Does it still count as today? When she looks up she can’t see through the canopy of the trees, can’t judge the time from the moon or the stars.

She yawns, blinks a few times. It feels like a long time every time she closes her eyes. This forest is as unfamiliar a place as she has ever been; the leaves are thick and various shades of deep green, nothing like the candyfloss blooms of home.  _ Bulb, _ does she even have a home anymore?

Ruby blinks. Yak flutters to another branch. Ruby blinks. Jet shifts a little in her sleep, stretching one of her arms out, a fuzzy shape in the dark. Ruby blinks.

When she opens her eyes, she’s sitting in a room she’s never been in. There are more books than she’s ever seen at once, lining the walls and stacked up on a large table, surrounding a map of Calorum. If she squints, some of the covers look familiar, the letters swimming around but reminiscent of Jet’s collection of banned books. A breeze whips through the room, sending pages fluttering, and Ruby knows from the smell of the air alone that she’s back in Castle Candy. 

She stands, knowing that she needs to—she needs to tell Mother something, she needs to see if Mother knows about Pops— 

The thoughts won’t stick in her head, fluttering out of reach like a swarm of confused butterflies. Something is wrong. She remembers that something is wrong.

“Something’s wrong,” she says, and she hears a sigh from the doorway.

When she turns, she sees a woman she knows from a statue, from a hazy dream, from the pain in Pops’ smile. 

_ Ruby,  _ she hears Archmage Lazuli say, though her mouth doesn’t seem to move.  _ Niece.  _ Her eyes glow through her crystal spectacles. 

“I don’t know—Something’s  _ wrong,”  _ Ruby swallows hard, suddenly holding back tears of frustration. Something’s happened, something’s turned her family inside out, something’s shattered her life in along fault lines she never knew were there.

_ Your pain grieves me.  _ Aunt Lazuli steps forward, soundless, and brings her hands up to cup Ruby’s face.  _ I would never have seen you and your sister hurt.  _

When her aunt’s hands touch the cold skin of her face, Ruby feels nothing beyond the barest hint of a breeze. 

“Why did—something’s wrong. Pops... why did Pops lie?”

_ You are my brother’s daughter,  _ Aunt Lazuli tells her.  _ The world is not as it could be, and you may be disappointed in it, but you are my brother’s daughter and you are loved. _

Something lets out a sudden  _ crack  _ in her left ear, and the Archmage’s gaze whips to the side to look at something behind Ruby. The wind changes, the smell of home vanishing.

_ Wake!  _ She orders, gaze burning in the sudden darkness that descends around them both.  _ You are not alone! _

Ruby comes to with an arrow already summoned in her hand, halfway into the motion of shooting Sour Scratch before she’s completely aware. The arrow hits its mark,  _ thuds  _ into the shoulder of the shadowed form of an Imperial scout who’d been no more than half a dozen feet from where Liam is sleeping.

Yak screeches in the trees above and Ruby lets out a shout.

_ “Up!”  _ She draws back another arrow, letting it fly. 

It misses the scout but knocks the cover off his lantern, lighting the dark woods with a golden glow and revealing his three fellows. Ruby doesn’t know why they’re here, how they came to find her party six hours off the beaten path, but it doesn’t matter.

Jet stands in one swift motion, Twizzling Blade already in hand, and Liam sits up with a spell on his lips.

Battle is strange, to try to explain. Ruby has never needed the vocabulary for it. She doesn’t have a word for the angry, agonized sound an enemy makes when their companion falls, arrows lodged in their chest. She doesn’t know what to call it, the way you feel when you’re back is up against a tree and an angry soldier is bearing down on you, only for your sister’s sword to stab through armor and bread and bone. She can’t—her friends in the circus had never taught her a trick to do when Liam runs out of crossbow bolts and yells something, the ground all around them erupting into jagged spikes of sugar and jawbreaker thorns. 

When it’s over, and whatever magic Liam's done fades enough for them to walk, Ruby finds herself staring down at the first scout. Jet’s rifling through their bags, calling Liam over to tell her what’s useful enough to bring with them and what they need to leave behind. His helmet got knocked off in the fight, the scout, and he seems not much older than her. Ceresian, flecked with parsley and garlic. She can’t stop looking at his still, still face.

“I’ve never killed anyone innocent before,” she says, when Jet comes to search this body too.

“You still haven't,” her sister reassures her. “We found their orders, they were sent to take us back to Comida, dead or alive.”

“How long can that be our reason?” she asks, turning to meet Jet’s gaze. By the Bulb, the look in her eyes. She almost doesn’t recognize her twin. 

“As long as it takes,” Jet looks so determined. “Until nobody’s trying to kill us anymore.”

_ When did they teach us that?  _ Ruby wonders.  _ Did I skip the lesson? _

“You look tired,” Liam says, coming up with an Imperial-made pack strapped to his back, Preston poking up over his shoulder.

“Thanks,” Ruby sighs. “I guess we should get moving.”

“Gimme a minute,” Jet tells them both, picking up their new lantern and moving to where she and Liam somehow piled the bodies without Ruby noticing. She lights the edge of the garlic bread scout’s hand, lets it burn for a second before blowing out the flame. The smell of toasted bread starts rising, and even in the dark Ruby can hear birds coming awake for it. 

“Hey, wait, when did you guys learn how to get rid of bodies?” Liam sounds dumbfounded, not lost the way Ruby feels but completely shocked, like he’d never expected a princess to have a skill like that.

“Last night,” Ruby says, feeling a little ill. “Senator Ciabatta taught us.”

“Wait, the guy Plumbeline wanted as emperor?” Liam starts walking, sure of his direction as ever, and though Ruby isn’t sure where exactly they’re heading now she follows him anyway.

“I’m not sure that she even wanted him for emperor. It might’ve all been a trick for Pops.”

“Yeah, or a trick for  _ us.”  _ Jet spits the last word, and Ruby’s glad for the darkness of the right, glad that she doesn’t have to see the anger on her sister’s face. “Maybe Ciabatta was playing us the whole time.”

“I don’t think so,” she offers, but Jet scoffs and Ruby is tired, her hand is stinging from a bad shot where her bowstring had snapped back against her palm. “What’s your  _ plan  _ then? What are we supposed to do about it?”

“It means something that Liam’s dad is king,” Jet starts. “Calroy was right, the people who care about titles will follow Liam now, because he’s a prince.”

“Ah, uh, what?” Liam inhales too suddenly and chokes a little, but Jet continues.

“And the people who care about, about us and Pops and Mother, they’ll follow me. We’re  _ getting  _ Pops back, we’re  _ getting  _ justice. If they want a war so bad they can fucking have one—we’ll  _ win.” _

There’s a long moment of quiet, just the sound of the three of them moving through the dark forest. Ruby is uncomfortably aware of everything—the weight of Yak dozing on her shoulder, her hand stinging, the smell of burnt toast in her nose.

“I mean,  _ I’d  _ follow you for sure,” Liam says at last. “We have to save them, they’d do it for us. We should—I didn’t even really wanna leave them behind, we should be the ones to get them back.”

Ruby is frowning before she realizes she’s doing it. She gets this wrinkle in her eyebrows, it makes her face sore if she holds it for too long. But Jet isn’t saying everything.

“You want to kill the Pontifex.”

“What?”

“No, I know you. I saw you, at the start of the battle. You want to kill the Pontifex.” There’s a rushing sound in Ruby’s ears, like she’s doing handstands on top of the carriage, like she’s flying on the trapeze, but worse somehow. Like the world’s moving and she’s moving but they’re at different speeds.

“Don’t you?” Jet asks, and it’s the exact wrong thing to say.

_“I want to join the circus!”_ Ruby whirls to face her sister and Liam turns, the lantern casting the three of them in strange shadows. “I want Pops to be okay, and Theobald and Calroy and Lapin, too. I want the fucking _Tart Guard_ to be alive, I want all of us to be home, and when I run away I want it to be my _choice!”_

Yak takes off from her shoulder, up through the trees. Ruby breathes hard, blinks back furious tears and a wave of deja vu. Something is  _ wrong,  _ something she never could’ve anticipated, something broken in such a way she can’t imagine fixing it.

There’s twenty seconds of absolute silence, before Ruby sighs, scrubs a hand over her eyes.  _ Fuck,  _ but she’s tired. 

“I’ll help you,” she says, feeling nothing so much as tired. “Of course I’ll help you. I’ll follow you—you’re my sister. But you can’t lie about what you want, not to us.”

“People aren’t gonna take  _ revenge quest  _ very well—” Jet starts, but Ruby doesn’t want to fight.

“I don’t care what other people think! I don’t care what we tell them; they can call us witches and bastards and every other kind of scoundrel. They can follow you and Liam to the edge of the world. But  _ we  _ don’t lie to each other,” she entreats, taking her sister’s hand. “We can’t start lying to each other.”

Preston lets out an agreeable  _ snort,  _ and the tension breaks.

“Liam too,” Jet says, drawn down to Ruby’s volume. She holds her other hand out to him.

“Wait, really?”

“You’re included in this promise,” Ruby tells him. They have to help each other, they  _ have  _ to, if they don’t she fears they’ll fly apart. Ruby needs someone in the world to trust, beyond just her sister, and her circus friends are gone. (And she doesn’t know if, if Mother knows about Pops, what Pops has done. If Sir Theobald and Lapin knew. How deep is it, the lie her life has been? How betrayed is she meant to feel?)

What else is there to do—Liam extends his hand in turn, lets Jet take it in a warrior’s grip.

“For Candia,” he offers.

“For Candia.”

Ruby takes a deep breath, squeezes her sister’s hand. “For  _ us.” _

\---

The letter comes addressed to Lady Caramelinda Merengue. It’s carried by an Imperial courier, the official nature of the correspondence evident from the presentation, even without the white-and-gold seal of the Bulbian Church on the envelope.

It is not the letter Caramelinda had been half-expecting, half-dreading. She knows before opening it that it will not announce Amethar’s ascension. It will not even announce his appointment as heir; there are protocols for that kind of letter, and none of them are being followed here.

But if the world wants to find her wrong-footed and scrambling, it should not come to her in Castle Candy. She informs the courier he will be given quarters and walks away before he can puff himself up to bluster at her, Sir Amanda falling in step behind her.

“Put a guard on his door,” she requests. “Please, there is something off about this. Your Majesty, I understand it will be difficult to explain—”

“Do it,” Caramelinda orders. She holds the letter in her own hands, walks with it all the way to her study. She holds the letter as if it is a naked blade.

Sir Amanda has a quiet word with the guard at the door and the candy nods before trotting off, presumably to make sure someone watches the courier.

“Lock the door,” Caramelinda requests, breaking the seal. What she reads... she does not drop the letter. She has been a queen these twenty years, she has been  _ the  _ ruling power in Candia for these twenty years. She does not drop the letter. It would be unseemly.

There will be no room for unseemly conduct now, she thinks. They must be very proper. They must be entirely shocked by these revelations, must be wronged and righteous.

“—jesty,” Sir Amanda is saying urgently, “Your Majesty, are you well?”

“When you took your oath to me, it was to  _ me.  _ Not to the throne, am I correct?”

“I—yes, it was. I swore to protect you for all of our lives, that you would never die while I yet lived. Your Majesty, what’s happened?” 

“Things are going to change,” and though her voice is steady she allows herself a moment to feel bleak. Surely she can spare a sentence, to mourn her life, to face the death of all she has built. Surely a sentence is not too much of a lapse. The words taste like nothing in her mouth. “I am not a queen any longer.”

(It is not that she loved it. She has never been fond of ruling, of holding the court that Amethar will not attend, of soothing the flighty nobles and pressuring the lethargic ones. But if you build a thing for twenty years, even if it was not the thing you dreamed of, well. You can permit yourself a moment to despair.)

“Read it,” she says, handing the letter to Sir Amanda, who looks at it as if it is a viper hidden among violet drops. When her champion lifts the parchment Caramelinda sees the back of it for the first time, covered in scribbles of odd, gleaming purple script. 

Sir Amanda will want to ask her if she knew. But it is not a line she will cross, not even with Lady Merengue rather than the Queen of Candia. It is... too close to her heart, for Sir Amanda to rist approaching it.

The knight returns the letter to her, steady as stone. Caramelinda flips it over and reads the back.

On the proper side, in a calligraphy she knows well, Lapin writes to her and informs her of a shocking series of events involving Amethar and the book of his sister Citrina, the beloved saint. He writes asking her to appeal to Joren Jawbreaker’s honor, urging her to get him to declare a truce, for if he does not the Concord will shatter her country beneath its boot. 

On the back, in words that smell of sugarplums, words Sir Amanda cannot see, her chancellor scribbles everything he knows. 

_ Heresy,  _ Caramelinda thinks, and she does not care at all. 

She asks Sir Amanda to fetch down her map of Candia, the one with the Imperial garrisons marked on it. The two of them spread it out on her table, weigh down the corners with chunks of orange rock candy. 

She has had her moment for despair, and it has turned sour in her mouth. Caramelinda moves on to anger.

“Sir Amanda,” she says, feeling very dangerous indeed, “this letter makes it clear that my husband and his compatriots are captives of the Bulbian Church, of my own faith.”

“Yes, Your Maj—my lady.”

“My daughters are missing, vanished into the wilderness with my husband’s ward, a kind young man lately accused of witchcraft.”

“Yes, my lady.”

“I would,” she pauses to take a breath, to feel the weight of her next words. “I would have your sword, in the coming days.”

Sir Amanda kneels, reminding Caramelinda so much of Theobald that it would make her knight laugh to hear her say it.

“I am with you until death,” Sir Amanda promises.

“I need to write to Joren Jawbreaker,” and oh, she is  _ not  _ looking forward to that letter. “But I must have your help as well, yours and all the members of the guard, yours and all our army, yours and all of Candia.”

“You shall have it,” Sir Amanda swears. “Whatever you need.”

Caramelinda Merengue has no legal claim to power in Candia beyond the province of Merengue. Her children have been named illegitimate, her husband false. The world will tear up every foundation she has ever built, if she allows it.

The world should not have come for her in Castle Candy. She writes to Joren Jawbreaker but does not wait for the reply, does not wait for Amethar’s uncle to come down from his mountains with the sons who make poor Liam so unhappy.

_ (I am the Heart of the Realm,  _ she warns him in her letter.  _ Every village in this country knows me as a just and benevolent ruler. They know you as a rebel and a vagabond.  _ _ Come to kill me if you must, but you will find me a very dangerous opponent. And for once, at last, we have a common enemy.) _

Caramelinda Merengue has no legal claim to the throne of Candia. She and Sir Amanda have a map that shows her just how deeply the Concord has sunk its fangs into her country. 

“Will they fight for me?” she asks, meaning the young of her country, meaning the old, meaning the artisans and heretics and veterans and potters and farmers and even the fucking circus performers. Meaning herself, her daughters, her husband and the memory of his sisters.

_ “Yes,”  _ Sir Amanda says, a hundred oaths within the word.

Caramelinda picks up a quill and orders the border closed, along with the immediate removal of all Concordian soldiers from Candian soil.

\---

The book and the letter, it all comes back to the book and the letter. The three of them, weary from several nights of travel and rough sleep, shelter in a copse as the sun starts to set. Preston trots this way and that, setting alarms. Yak is somewhere in the sky above them, watching with sharp eyes.

Jet cracks open the tome from the archives as Ruby and Liam go over their mission with Ciabatta again. The letter, it all comes back to the letter, for Belizabeth Brassica. Something in these words made them valuable enough for a liar of Primogen Alfredi’s talents to hide them away.

(She’s been having strange dreams. Battlefields, a hail of arrows falling, the sword moving as an extension of her self. There is a woman with her, but Jet never sees her face.

_ You are not alone,  _ she says every night, before making Jet get into a stance and forcing her to go through sword forms.)

“Whatcha thinking?” Liam asks, flopping down in the grass next to her and breaking her reverie. 

“That this  _ piece of paper  _ is a weapon,” Jet says, wrinkling her nose in distaste. “They didn’t get Pops in trouble with a sword, they used Aunt Citrina’s book. I think this book could be as important as that one.”

“I don’t know how to fight with a letter,” Ruby grumbles, sitting down next to the both of them and frowning again. Ruby’s been frowning for the last three days. She’s got Sour Scratch in her lap and runs her hand along the bowstring every once in a while as they talk.

“They do in Ceresia,” Liam sighs on the last syllable, picking a few pieces of grass and testing them. “Huh, edible.  _ Anyway,  _ we probably don’t have anyone there who’d teach us, huh.”

“We have to get to Candia anyway. Mother—and your father, I guess, Liam—will know what to do.” It kinda sucks, Jet’s finding, to be in charge. And she  _ is  _ in charge; she’s the oldest of the three of them, even if she can’t claim to be the next king anymore.

Liam winces at the mention of his father, thinks of how his family calls Amethar an oathbreaker, thinks of how the world calls him one now, too. Still...

“He’ll definitely want to fight the Concord,” he offers. “And if a letter’s a weapon, he’ll figure out how to use it.”

They spend a little while munching on the last of the rations from the scouts, supplemented by the edible plants Liam’s found along the journey. Jet decides she misses honey.

(An incomplete mental list of things Jet misses: honey, Sprinkle, having a secret beau who seemed exciting, sneaking out of Castle Candy, Lapin’s lessons, as boring as they’d been. The promise of learning a finishing blow. The annoying way the Swirlys talk. A world that makes sense. Unwavering faith in Pops’ decision-making. Waking up without the Twizzling Blade already in hand.)

The sun goes down and Liam gets first watch, contemplating secrets in the growing dark. They only light the lantern when they absolutely need it, lately, to save fuel. This is not one of those times. Jet and Ruby lay nearby, back to back with their weapons in easy reach.

“No one will believe us,” Liam says into the dark. “That the Pontifex is bad, I mean. No one will believe what the letter says, if it even says anything useful.”

“Alfredi knew,” Ruby says, already sounding drowsy. “She knew.”

“She’s one person, what does that prove?”

“That it wasn’t a well-kept-enough secret. If one person knows, other people will know too. And if other people know,” Ruby breaks off into a yawn.

“People will believe us,” Jet says. “We’ll make them believe us.”

“Pontifex won’t,” Ruby yawns again, trailing off. “Won’t know what... hit her.”

The twins fall asleep. Preston leans against his side, cool and minty, and if Liam strains his ears he can almost hear the spirits of the world stirring beneath them.

He pulls a seed from his pocket and finds it has already sprouted.

**Author's Note:**

> these kids.... theyre kids.... who can you trust but each other  
> title comes from “Rockslide” by, yet again, The Crane Wives. look, i just listen to a lot of their music. rocks works because of the name. the song is about outrunning. genuinely three different songs from coyote series were considered for this.   
> The setup for this fic is a little convoluted (i’m not sure the twins would in-character agree to leave the rest of the party) but i wanted this particular story to happen. my man calroy... a good dude. i know we can’t trust anyone but i trust him :( he’s a slice of cake :( surely a slice of cake would never betray us  
> hope you enjoyed this fic! leave a comment and let me know what you think, i really treasure them!


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